Rosa Brooks and Sheelah Kolhatkar on Hurricane Katrina

This week on CounterSpin: “Katrina Rekindles Adversarial Media” –that headline from USA Today has been a theme in a number of press reports, which see signs of critical and independent thinking on the part of reporters covering the hurricane and its aftermath. Others aren’t so sanguine, wondering why it took a disaster of this scale to shake reporters into acting like, well, reporters. How is covering this story affecting journalists? And how long will those effects last?

We’ll talk today with Rosa Brooks, of the University of Virginia School of Law, about mainstream media’s ‘startling discovery’ of poor people.